Former McKinsey partner Ali Korotana named managing director with Cogna

Cogna has appointed Ali Korotana as managing director in the firm’s strategic industries segment. He joins from strategy consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where he spent more than a decade advising executives across energy, chemicals, construction, manufacturing, and logistics.

Ben Peters, CEO and co-founder of Cogna, commented, “Ali has spent his career inside the boardrooms of the world’s most operationally complex industries – the exact businesses Cogna is built to transform. He’ll help our customers move from isolated AI experiments to programmes that change how their companies run.”

Cogna is an AI platform launched in 2023. The firm works to try and capture operational knowledge, and to translate that into what it calls “enterprise-grade AI agents and applications”, that it claims can “help teams make better decisions, [and] automate manual work and improve performance”.

Working as a managing director at Cogna, Korotana will partner directly with the CEOs, senior leaders and investors of clients, to help draw up strategic transformation programmes through the Cogna platform. As well as working to change how those businesses operate, he will also build Cogna’s relationships with private equity.

Korotana will draw on two decades of experience to undertake this work – including knowhow from working in with energy, chemicals, construction, manufacturing, logistics, and engineering clients during his spell at McKinsey & Company. Korotana was elected to partner with the MBB giant in 2021, and he consulted on projects from cutting costs in multi-billion-pound infrastructure programmes, to expanding a $10 billion logistics business into new verticals including defence and pharmaceuticals – as well as executing industrial and energy M&A transactions from $50 million to $50 billion.

Over the course of his career, Korotana’s work has taken him to more than 20 countries, from North America to South East Asia, and from Scandinavia to the Gulf. This also included a six-year tenure as an engineer with the Maersk Group’s oil and gas wing, prior to life at McKinsey. In that time, he worked in some of the toughest operational environments in the industry – offshore in the North Sea and onshore in remote Kazakhstan.

Commenting via a post on LinkedIn, Korotana noted, “Cogna sits at the confluence of two themes I care deeply about: lifting industrial productivity and deploying AI to improve our livelihoods. I’ve spent the best part of 20 years working in operationally complex industries, and have a deep appreciation of their contribution to our economy and society. It’s a privilege to get to play my part in this mission.”